Re: <nettime> DeeDee Halleck on Herb Schiller's death

[Prashanth Mundkur <mundkur@ece.uci.edu>]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, geert lovink wrote:

> Information Inequality
> An interview with Herbert I. Schiller
> By Geert Lovink
[...] 
> Like Chomsky,
> his lack of knowledge about the history of the Sovjet Union, stalinism and
> the destruction of people's lives, cities, countries and nature by sovjet
> communism is highly disturbing.  But this counts for many of the old


Hi Geert,

Thanks for the interview, 'twas interesting. But your remark below   
didn't fit in well with what little I know.

>Like Chomsky, his lack of knowledge about the history of the Sovjet
>Union, stalinism and the destruction of people's lives, cities,
>countries and nature by sovjet communism is highly disturbing.  But
>this counts for many of the old leftists, who are themselves a product
>of the Cold War (both in Europe, the US and in the 'Third World').

I don't know anything about Schiller, but from
what little Chomsky I have read, it seems that he
is and was highly critical of Soviet (and other
statist) communism. In fact, he seems to have been
remarkably consistent in this. Sticking to the
Soviet system, we find him quoting Rudolf Rocker
approvingly in 1968:

  Rudolf Rocker's comments are, I believe, quite
  to the point:
 "[...]
  For two decades the supporters of
  Bolshevism have been hammering into the masses
  that dictatorship is a vital necessity for 
  the defense of the so-called proletarian
  interests against the assaults of the
  counter-revolution and for paving the way for
  Socialism.  [...] In Russia, the so-called
  dictatorship of the proletariat has not led to
  Socialism, but to the domination of a new
  bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole
  people  ... "

  ("Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship", 1968,
   reprinted in "The Chomsky Reader", 1987, pg 90)


He says, in an interview in Jan 1974, 

 "I think it's a tremendous tragedy for the
  socialist movement as a whole that the Russian
  Revolution was identified as socialist."
 
  (Interview 7, "Language and Politics", 1988, pg 177)


More recently, in briefly recounting the events of
the Cold War, he says of the "two phases" on the
Soviet side:  

 "The first phase saw the quick demolition of
  incipient socialist tendencies, the
  institutionalization of a totalitarian state,
  and extraordinary atrocities, particularly under 
  Stalin. 
  [...]
  In its second phase, from 1945, major events of
  the Cold War on the Russian side were its
  repeated interventions in the East European
  satellites and the invasion of Afghanistan[...]"

  (pgs 37,39, "World Orders old and new", 1994)


I'm only using the books I have at hand. I am
curious if you can provide examples of Chomsky's 
ignorance of the nature of Soviet communism.

Thanks,

--prashanth

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